Episode 112 Necromancing the Stone: The Thrill of Dancing with the Dead

Feb 28, 2019

“Pulse Evolution is an entertainment company that used a hologram technique several years ago to ‘summon the ghost of slain rapper Tupac Shakur’ at the Coachella music festival. The necromantic language seems appropriate. This was not a music video per se, but a live performance. Whether ‘Ghost Dancing’ will become a new entertainment venue or just another passing fad remains to be seen, but it says something about the progression of celebrity culture born more than a century ago out of the Graphic Revolution. In his groundbreaking book The Image, historian Daniel Boorstin described how our culture had created ‘a thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.’Taken together, telegraphy, photography, radio, cinema, and television brought forth the pseudo-event, an occurrence staged to call attention to itself. Boorstin was not just concerned with the now-familiar’photo-op’ or ‘media event.’ He put his finger on a much larger problem. Americans not only confused the copy with the original but also actually preferred the copy to the original. News was no longer gathered; it was made. The traveler, a person who travails, had been replaced with the tourist — a person who stays at American hotels in France made to look like French hotels.”

This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Arthur W. Hunt III about his CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL cultural discernment article “Necromancing the Stone: The Thrill of Dancing with the Dead.”